Welcome to Smooth Stones, episode 188, and this is called. Yeah, it does get better. Uh, maybe I’m still working on the title as I’m recording this, but it does get better. And this is something I thought maybe I should do some segments on my podcast. Lots of the podcasts I love have these cool segments or special episodes, and I wanna almost call it grief rants, but I’m not ranting is not really.

In my like personality per se. So I just wanna call it things that Amy feels really passionately about. And here’s the deal. I am in a lot of Facebook support groups. I talk to a lot of people. I run an in-person support group with the local charity. I talk to a lot of people. Um, I have seen over and over this idea that.

It doesn’t get better, that it never gets better. And recently there were multiple things. So again, I’m not gonna like what happens in support groups and all of that. I is, um, I’m very respectful of that. But I’ll just say, I, sometimes you notice something over and over. And what I’ve seen over and over is a lot of people saying.

Yeah, like how do you keep going? If nothing ever gets better, if it sucks this bad as it does at the beginning, why would you wanna keep going? And I think that’s a really valid question because what happens is. As we’re grieving, we’re looking for support, we’re looking for options. We’re looking for things that are gonna help us.

And there’s lots out there. There are lots of ideas. There’s the things I’m telling you, there’s things you’re reading, there’s things you’re finding in from peers or people who’ve been through this. There’s things that, you know, maybe people you respect, um, leaders, your faith, community, all of that. Lots and lots of ideas.

And you’re looking for that, you’re searching for that because you want something to hold onto. You need that lifeline. And what really bothers me, and again, I absolutely validate everyone in their moment, in their story, in what they’re sharing, in their experience, in my experience. That’s not a lifeline to tell someone that it sucks forever and you’re never gonna be happy.

You’re always gonna hurt this bad. You’re always gonna miss your baby this bad. You’re always gonna struggle. And this can go for grief or like anything in your life. Uh. Like, for example, last year, if you’ve been here a minute, last year we ended up moving twice. We sold our house. We didn’t know where we were going.

We moved in with my in-laws for a minute with like I have with four living kids and just, we had a lot of uncertainty. If I just told myself, well, it’s always kind of gonna be like this, I would’ve probably lost it. And I did lose it a few times. Uh, it was a struggle. It was good. Like it had all the parts overall, like it went relatively well considering our circumstances.

But I knew like someday we’re gonna figure out where we’re gonna be. We’re gonna work out like some of the things that were happening, the reasons why we were waiting and like. Anyways, why we couldn’t just immediately figure out where we were living because there was a lot of factors. Um, but yeah, if I didn’t think we’re gonna figure this out, and I thought we were gonna figure out it out a lot sooner, I thought it was gonna be a couple months.

It ended up being, you know, nearly a year and. I just kept telling myself like, surely we’re gonna get answers. Surely we’re gonna get answers. Surely we’re gonna make, be able to make some decisions, surely we’re gonna get some relief. And I just kept holding onto that hope that we were gonna find a resolution to our problem, which was, you know, partially, um.

Some movement in my husband’s job, and then partially like where were we gonna live in relation to that? And so there are these, these things out there that I think are so incredibly helpful to some people at some moments in time. No matter what challenge you’re going through, so I really want you to apply this to anything that feels hard right now, whether it’s, you know, your grief, or whether it’s relationship stuff or financial stuff, or you know, goals and trying to figure out what you want to do with yourself, or parenting.

There’s, there’s so many hard things, uh, so many challenges. But for example, one of these theories that you see a lot in grief is that your grief is this ball. And you can’t see my hands, but if you watch me on YouTube, um, you can just watch my gestures. But it’s a ball. And the ball is, let’s say this is a six inch diameter ball.

It’s just this black ball of grief. And there’s a graphic where it shows how in early grief the, the ball’s in a jar and it’s filling the entire jar like the ball’s, six inches, the jar is six inches. It is full of. Dark grief. And then as time goes on, the ball stays the same, but the jar gets bigger. And the, the story there is that the grief doesn’t change, but your capacity to handle it does.

And I just want to, because I wanna be a light for you and. I wanna be real with you. I don’t agree with that. I think it’s really helpful in some circumstances. I think it’s really helpful, uh, especially at the beginning when your grief is so tied to your love and you cannot differentiate the two. The grief feels like your connection to your person who has died.

And you don’t wanna be told that that’s gonna lessen, that your grief will lessen because. That feels like something’s being taken away from you. So I can see where in certain moments this can be a really beautiful take and a really helpful illustration that you’re always gonna miss your person. You’re always gonna love them, and, but you are gonna get, you know, better and better at handling this pain.

But here’s where I disagree. I think the pain does get better. I think it gets smaller. I am not curl up in my bed crying every day because my daughter died 12 years ago. And it’s not because of the time entirely. It is partially because of the time, but it’s because of the work I’ve put in, the things I’ve learned and being intentional.

With my grief and it’s not the same. I remember a few days after she died, we went to go bury my daughter in my husband’s hometown. ’cause we were living far away and we didn’t wanna bury her in that town. We didn’t think we’d be there forever. So we drove up to bury her and I happened to have my milk come in that day.

My chest. Was rock hard. I’d had a full term stillbirth I could not like. I couldn’t hug people. I was in so much physical pain. I was in so much emotional pain. We really invited just like the, the very close family to the burial because I just didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone. I couldn’t handle anything.

I didn’t wanna do anything. I just like, I. Wanted people there, but I also just didn’t wanna, didn’t think I could talk, like I didn’t have the capacity for anything. And then I just remember crying my eyes out because it hurt so much. And I love breastfeeding my babies. I had had four others. I had nursed all of them.

The milk coming in was just. So heartbreaking and so painful, and I had to get this huge pile of pillows, um, just to be able to kind of lay down without it hurting, and that was awful. I don’t feel that way now. I don’t feel that intensity of pain. I don’t feel the physical pain, obviously, I don’t feel. The emotional pain.

I don’t feel like I can’t talk to people. Obviously I can talk to people. I’m talking to you. I talk to people all the time about my story, about my daughter. I think to myself, if I would do it over again, I would’ve invited tons of people because I would’ve wanted people to see, you know, her. Just to be there and to be able to support me.

But at the time, no, I didn’t want a ton of people there. So all that to say, if I believed on that day that I buried my daughter and I could not hug anybody ’cause it hurt so bad and that I was like in a ball crying, just like awful, devastated if I believed. It was always gonna be like that, but I was just gonna get better at handling that.

Are you kidding? I’d be, I mean, who would choose that? Who would want to continue doing that for the rest of their life and that you would only get relief, like if you believe in an afterlife, that you would only get some relief when you’re dead. That that’s the only way out of this.

That just doesn’t make any sense to me and it’s not true. So what I want for you to hear, as I passionately give you my opinion, um, that if something works, if there’s something someone says or something you read or whatever. Someone offers you, let’s pretend it’s like even there’s a platter with a whole bunch of grief tools, a whole bunch of coping skills, a whole bunch of, you know, help in front of you for any life challenge.

You get to take the ones that help you, and you get to take the ones that help you in the moment. So, like I said, it might help you at some points to think. It doesn’t get better, but I’ll figure it out. That might help you. That might give you some hope and some relief and some direction, but if it doesn’t help you, if it’s not helping you, if you’re reaching out and saying, friends who know pain, is it true that it is never gonna get better?

And they’re all like, yeah, it never gets better. I think it might be time for you to put that back and find different people, right? Not abandoning your loss friends or your whoever, or your, your friends who are like totally, um, in the story with you who believe that, that your thing is just awful and it’s never gonna get better.

Um, you still love them, all of it, but I would say you might want to look for some things that will help you more in this moment. If what you’re believing is causing you harm and suffering and help causing you to lose hope, you don’t have to keep holding onto that. There are infinite beliefs about how to handle hard things.

And there are infinite things that help each one of us, and we’re all different. But I wanna tell you that I am offering that it does get better. It absolutely gets better. So I wanted to give an example, and I think examples sometimes are a little bit of a problem because they never are exactly on. Um, but I was thinking about, so my first rainbow baby was born a year after my daughter was still born at full term, and he came out of the womb just like wild boy all boy, nonstop, full energy.

And he was jumping on our trampoline one day. And we all know trampolines. They can be, uh, tricky, but they’re so much fun. But he was jumping and he started crying. He came in and he was like, my leg hurts. My leg hurts. And we’re like, what happened? He’s like, I don’t know. I was just jumping. I think he was just like, just about three years old.

Um, so he couldn’t really explain what happened and his sisters were on the tramp, his big sisters, and they were like, we don’t know. He was just jumping, like they weren’t doing anything. Outta the ordinary. And you know, the way he was crying, the way he was acting, the way he wasn’t putting weight on it, I thought, you know what, as much as this child is like covered in bandaids and hurting himself all the time, because he just is living life at level 10.

Um. It felt like more than that. So we took him to the hospital. He ended up having broken his leg. There’s like a part in the lower leg that, um, I guess doesn’t harden fully until kids are about five. And so it’s a little fragile and it’s a very common trampoline injury. It wasn’t severe. It was just kind of this hairline crack where he had broken his leg.

Well, he was in a lot of pain, right? He was crying. He’s miserable. All the things. Screaming and if you’ve broken a bone, we often think, oh, you just go to the hospital. They’re like, it’s broken. They put a cast on it. Well, that’s not what happens because they have to let it swell and then the swelling to go down before you can put a cast on it.

So he had to go home and he is this really rambunctious little boy, and we had to keep him still for a few days while. Swelling came up, swelling went down so they could put a cast on him. Now that was tough. That was insanely tough. He didn’t wanna be on the couch, he didn’t wanna sit still. His leg hurt.

He was struggling, he was bored. He just, and we are trying everything. We’re just like trying to let him do all the things we don’t do and like watch zillions of movies and just like anything we can do, and I even think we are. Potty training at the time. So I remember we were like lining the couch with stuff in case he had an accident and like it was a lot.

So then we go get the cast, well he gets the cast on and that’s a challenge too. And they put him in this full little kind of boot. So it went all the way up to his knee and like all the way onto his foot and you know, to try to immobilize him. That was kind of hard and, and again, we’re like trying to keep him on the couch so he can heal and he doesn’t wanna be on the couch.

He wants to be moving around, but his legs still hurt enough that he wasn’t going anywhere. He was pretty content and we had great neighbors and friends and they like brought little coloring books and little toys for him to play with and everyone was so kind. So we get through that phase. Um, then he starts feeling better.

Then he starts getting used to the cast and we tried to get him like a walker thing, or they, I can’t even remember, it was a while ago, but it was like he wasn’t supposed to put any weight on it for six weeks. And like I’ve said a million times now, you cannot keep this child down. Um, so once he got used to the cast, the main problem was keeping him still.

Keeping him calm, keeping him indoors. He would sneak out into our yard and I would like find him in the sandbox in his cast and just be like, dude, like you have to come in. You can’t be out here. And then he was like walking on the cast and it was so dirty. And that was the rest of the process was like just keeping him.

As calm as we could so that that healing could happen so that he could continue on. And no matter how much I explained to him as a little guy, like, you gotta rest, you gotta all this stuff. He, he just couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t sit still. So it was a bit of a struggle for me. It was definitely a struggle for him.

Uh, he was just off to the races and then we got to get the cast off and then it’s like, oh, you have to relearn to. Not learn to walk necessarily. ’cause it was only a few weeks, but it’s like, get used to not having the cast and is everything gonna be okay? Are we gonna hurt it again? Like it’s tender, it’s, you know, the skin is soft or the skin was itchy, or whatever it is.

So you’ve got that phase of it. And then eventually now, uh, like seven, eight years later. It’s like it never happened. Now if you took an x-ray, you might see that. You might see that tiny little hairline, uh, fracture and he a healed fracture in his leg, but he doesn’t really think about it. I don’t know. He might get twinges from time to time.

I’m not sure. I haven’t asked him. Um. Sometimes we, you know, Facebook will throw up a memory of that time and it’s like, oh, I remember that. Now breaking your leg is not like your child dying. But in this story, what I want you to see is if someone broke their leg and people told them it’s gonna hurt, like it hurt when you were sitting in the ER waiting to be seen, that would not be helpful.

And I want you to notice how in each phase of the healing process it, there were changes, there were shifts, and there were different things that were hard and there were different things that were good right there. There’s lots of goodness in this story. We had lots of friends, we had good medical care.

We had, you know, we got to spend time with this little guy. We, we really. I had lots of good things and lots of struggles in each phase, but as we got through each phase, the best we could in the end, the bone healed. And what I want to be really clear is that did get better. Just like you are going to get better.

If you are in deep, like even if you’re at rock bottom, I think that’s something people talk about a lot is you gotta hit rock bottom to go back up. So sometimes it’s like a long, hard journey down, or we have like multiple rock bottoms where we think it can’t get any lower and then it does. And thank you life for giving us those opportunities to learn.

But even when we talk about hitting rock bottom, it’s like. The story is you’re gonna bounce back, like you’re gonna start climbing out of the hole. So I think you’ve gotta believe that, and I want to be really clear that there isn’t necessarily better than here. There’s a lot of this like, does it get better?

What we’re really saying is, will I be this sad forever? Will I be in this much pain and heartache forever? And again, my answer is no. But is it better? I don’t know because here we like to explore here, I’m gonna encourage you to be curious. So like the broken leg story, we have a couple of phases. So we have the acute pain phase where it’s just very, very physically.

Painful or in a grief sense, emotionally, physically, like mentally, it’s acute pain. And then as we go along, we do find things that help. We do have things that support us. We do find some relief, right? Even with time passing and, um, as we’re doing all the things we’re trying to do, listening to podcasts.

Thank you for being here. It does provide some relief from that acute pain, and it does go in waves. We know that it’s up and down is not linear, but after that kind of relief, we’re going to move into healing.

We’re going to start mending those broken bones and we’re gonna start mending those broken hearts. Then, you know, that I think is the journey. That’s the rest of your life. The rest of your life is continuing to heal, continuing to grow, continuing to learn, um, continuing to put yourself in situations where you might have other challenges, right?

We’re not just gonna go hide in our rooms. We are going to live life, and so we can go through this. This process over and over and then like with the broken leg, you might come to the time where you literally don’t think about it. Now, for us, in our grief, I think what that looks like is we do think about our babies every day, but it doesn’t hurt.

It’s not painful. It’s just love and memory and even just like missing them. But it’s not a painful missing them. It’s just like, oh yeah, like. I wish they were here. I wish they didn’t die. And, and that is the path. So I wanna come back around to this word. What is better? You can’t have any of this process without all the pieces when you’re in acute pain, when all you can do is cry when all you can do is think about your baby when all you can do is like, sit and wonder if it’ll ever get better.

That is part of the process. You can’t skip it. People try to skip it. We’ve probably seen that, whether it’s in like books, movies, et cetera, or stories of like history, right? We know that there was a lot of time where people thought it was better to just pretend it didn’t happen. When you skip that, it’s tough.

I encourage you not to skip that, and if you have been trying to skip and avoid the acute pain through any means, I would encourage you to question whether that’s working for you and if you think it’s better to avoid that pain. But I believe that that suffering, that pain, um. That comes when we love something and it’s no longer with us, is beautiful and valuable.

And I think the process of trying things and getting relief and getting support and learning and growing is a beautiful part of the process. And a lot of the time that is like us crawling around with the cast on our leg or us. Trying too hard and hurting ourselves again, and having to like take a step back and readjust it is riding all those waves.

It is becoming resilient and like using that resilience to keep going, to keep taking steps to te, keep taking breaths, one after the other and that is a great stage. And then there’s the healing stage where you feel like you’ve, the pain is not as acute and you’re not working so hard to not be sad.

. And this is like when we’ve integrated our grief. It’s become part of our life and we’re moving on with it, bringing it with us as we move forward.

So life is really the journey, not the destination. And I think that’s another pitfall of this idea that it doesn’t get better. You just grow around the pain because, uh, if you think that. You’re kind of just like still waiting for some future time when like you’ve grown enough that this big ball of grief isn’t hurting you anymore, and it, I don’t know, I just, it sets you up to still be thinking that it will be better someday and someday is really hard for our brains.

Because we don’t know when that’s gonna happen. And when we’re in deep acute grief, we’re not gonna be able to visualize it or we’re gonna judge ourselves, or we’re gonna beat ourselves up and we’re gonna think that we’re doing something wrong because we haven’t got to better yet, that we’re not feeling better enough.

But it’s just, it’s not true. It’s, this is a journey. There isn’t some place over the horizon that’s better. There’s just now what we have is now. And if you are gonna think about the future, what I wanna say and what I feel incredibly passionate about is there is so much hope. Hold onto the hope. Listen to me when I tell you it does get better.

It absolutely does. And I have watched friends from the minute I helped them hold their sweet tiny baby in the hospital as they cried and we took pictures and they had no idea what to do. Watching them take step after step, watching them get pregnant again, watching them not know how to do that, watching them continue to grow and.

Live when they didn’t think they could live and they said it. I don’t think I can do this. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t think it’s ever gonna get better. I, I don’t think I’ll ever stop crying every day. But they did. And they do. And you will too no matter what your challenges. There are a lot of things going on in the world.

There’s always hope. There’s just always hope and I don’t know another way to live. When my baby died, I was like, I am gonna figure this out. I’m gonna figure this out, and I want you to hold onto that too. Like I figure this out and if I don’t wanna believe that, it’s never gonna get better. I’m not gonna believe it.

I’m gonna take that idea, that theory, that beautiful offering that someone might have given to you, and I’m gonna put it back. You don’t need to use any tools in grief or in your life that don’t help you, that includes anything I say. You don’t have to agree with me, you don’t have to do what I share with you.

Uh. I’m just gonna give you what I’ve seen and you take it and you go with it. But I want you to know that you’re not doing anything wrong. If you can’t see how it’s ever gonna be better, that’s fine.

If you don’t even know what better means, that’s fine too, right? Or maybe we get rid of the word better. It just gets different. You’re just gonna go through the process of going from acute pain into healing and continuing to live with the scars, with the hairline fracture that’s still there, but it doesn’t hurt anymore, right?

We’re never gonna erase that. We can’t go back. We can’t unbreak the leg, but we can keep going and keep living our life. Um, this. Is just, it’s so important to me and I wanted to add that. Really, there are so many ways to help you along your journey. I would love to be one of them. I am here and available to you.

Reach out to me on Instagram, come and join one of my coaching programs. I’ve got lots of cool stuff going on, and I have time and space to help you. If you’re listening to this podcast, sometimes the next step is reaching out or finding a therapist or whatever it is. If you can’t see hope in the future, and if you can’t see hope today, um, but I just know that

I wanna share my belief and I try really hard to keep this podcast very inclusive. So no matter what your belief system, you are welcome here. But my faith is a very strong part of my journey. And I wanna say too, that sometimes we think. That like heaven is the only place we’ll find peace. And I wanna say that if you bring God, if you bring a higher power into your life and you ask for direction, and you ask for comfort, and you ask for healing, you can find it.

I don’t think that God wants us to suffer our entire lives only to get relief in heaven. Only to hold onto hope that the day we die, finally we’ll have peace. Now, do I think my joy will be more complete when I have all my babies in my arms? Absolutely. I look forward to that day with all my heart, but I don’t think that God wants us to suffer.

And so I would encourage you if that’s something that you’ve been believing. If you’ve been only believing that you can find relief in the next life, which seems so far away, bring it back to today. Pray. If that means screaming at heaven, if that means not even having anything to say. But just sending some, some feelings to heaven.

I’ve had a few of those moments myself lately on like an unrelated life challenge and it’s like, oh, I’m just mad. I’m just mad and I don’t wanna even talk to you sometimes. But I do know that there is help for us and there is support, um, in our faith, whatever that looks like. So. I’ll just wrap up by saying this.

I am very, very passionate about telling you personally that it does get better to me, better means, yeah, we learn about our grief, we understand it, and we’ll allow it. We stop fighting it. We stop fighting what happened, and we learn to live with it every day, even if we hate it. And also we keep doing the things we need to do so that one day we can look at our journey and say, wow, I never believed this.

I didn’t think I could do this. Deep down inside something said yes you can. Or maybe it’s, I remember when I listened to this episode, I remember when Amy said, yes, it gets better. And that started me on a journey and that started me on a path that led to where I am now. So I don’t know what your timeline looks like.

I don’t know what your life looks like. I don’t know how many more losses or hard things you’re gonna have to endure. But I do know that when you trust yourself, when you keep trying, you cannot fail. There is no wrong way to do this. Being a human is messy and it’s hard, but we’re not meant to sit in the acute suffering forever.

If you do feel like you’re stuck in that acute suffering, please get help, but also know that that is just part of it. I couldn’t be where I am now if I didn’t cry every day for like a year. If I wasn’t mad that my second miscarriage happened for like two and a half years. If I wasn’t blaming myself for years, if I like all the things.

If I wasn’t a basket case my entire first rainbow pregnancy, right? It’s not that I have it all figured out, it’s just that I did it. I’ve done it. I’m doing it.

You can do it too. I love you so much. I. I want you to believe that it will get better. You will not always hurt like this no matter what happens. No matter what hard things and hard decisions and hard, uncomfortable stuff you gotta go through,

you gotta do it ’cause you matter. You’re amazing and I wanna send you so much love. I’ll see you next time.